I know that I stayed away from most of it, made me feel sick actually. I tried post things contradicting what was said but gave up quite quickly and just stayed off reddit and teamliquid for a couple of weeks. A lot of the hate wasn't even normal users of this subreddit. If you looked through a lot of the people who wrote in those threads they were mostly posting on other subreddits.

Yep totally agree. That's one of the reasons Reddit isn't suited for well rounded discussion of controversial topics in my opinion, because unpopular opinions will almost be hidden by default, no matter if fair points are made.

Hopefully all that is over though. However I suspect we might have this same discussion in a few years just after LotV is out and we are talking about how stupid people were for thinking the game was dead 5 months earlier.

Probably. Seems to happen for most e-sports titles on a regular basis. Back in CS 1.6 a lot of people claimed it was dead for several times and it survived for years and years even without the strong support of a developer. I think Blizzard has proven that we can feel really happy to have them involved in SC2.